The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale
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Margaret Atwood on The Handmaid's Tale
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A question about how oppression actually worksAtwood began writing in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan’s administration was completing its first term and the organized Christian right had become a permanent fixture of Republican politics. The decade’s anti-feminist pushback was the immediate provocation, and she framed the book as her answer to a single operational question.
The Handmaid’s Tale was written in 1984, sorry to have been so corny. The 1980s was a decade of pushback against the uprising of the many kinds of feminism in the 1970s. People were saying that they would like women to be back in the home in their rightful sphere, and that all of the gains that people thought they had made ought to be reversed. And so The Handmaid’s Tale was partly an answer to the question, ‘If you were going to shove women back into the home and deprive them of all of these gains that they thought they had made, how would you do it?’
Born in 1939, Atwood grew up inside the living memory of fascism, and that biographical fact gave her the structural question that runs beneath the whole novel. She was not asking whether a theocratic takeover could happen in the abstract; she was asking what specific form it would take on American soil.
My ever-present question, since I was born in ‘39, is: If there were to be a totalitarianism in the United States, what would it look like? What would be the slogan? What would be the excuse? Because they all come in with: ‘We’re going to make things so much better, but first, we have to get rid of those people.’
Her Harvard graduate work in the early 1960s had put her inside 17th-century American Puritanism for years, studying under the scholar Perry Miller. By the time she sat down to write, she had a specific historical argument about where American authoritarianism would draw its blueprints.
The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.
How she wrote it
A box of clippings and a rented typewriterBefore a single scene was written, Atwood set herself a constraint that governed every element of the world she built. Gilead, the book’s theocratic successor state to the United States, could contain nothing she could not document. The rule made the novel’s horrors harder to dismiss, because each one had a real address.
I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior.
The evidence supporting that rule was not gathered through formal archival research. It accumulated over years of ordinary reading, and it now sits at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Penguin brought Atwood back to look at the box, and she described what she found there: clippings on Ceaușescu’s mandatory pregnancy-testing policy in Romania, on the rise of the American religious right, on fertility-reducing industrial chemicals, and on electronic debit card systems.
I didn’t even research it. There was no Internet then, you couldn’t just go online and put in a topic, so this is just stuff I came across when reading newspapers and magazines. I cut things out and put them in a box. I already knew what I was writing about and this was backup. In case someone said, ‘How did you make this up?’
The physical setting where the novel was drafted was not incidental. Atwood was living in West Berlin in 1984, with the Berlin Wall literally encircling the city, and she crossed into East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland during this period. The surveillance culture she encountered there gave Gilead its atmosphere of whispered speech and self-censorship.
I started The Handmaid’s Tale on a German keyboard typewriter which I had rented. Berlin was encircled by the Berlin Wall... people were very reluctant to talk to you, unless they had a safe place to do it in and unless they were pretty certain that you weren’t going to blow their cover. So I did a certain amount of that. It was pretty instructive, how afraid people were of saying anything that was going to get them in trouble.
The name given to the novel’s narrator, Offred, a handmaid whose identity under Gilead’s patronymic system belongs entirely to the man she serves, came from a deliberate linguistic experiment. Atwood worked through European naming conventions until she found a word that carried both the system’s logic and an accidental second meaning.
I was looking at the European patronymic systems... So I just wrote the word ‘of,’ which is the equivalent of ‘de’ or ‘von,’ and then I wrote a number of men’s names. Offred was the one that stuck.
The name also contains the word ‘red,’ the color of the handmaid’s habit. Neither meaning was accidental, and together they compress the entire logic of Gilead’s social order into a single word.
Asked how long the book took to write, Atwood gave an answer that placed the visible nine months of drafting inside a far longer span. The claim reframes what the novel is drawing on: not research conducted for one project, but millennia of accumulated female experience.
How long did it take you to write The Handmaid’s Tale, I am sometimes asked. It may look like only a year, but the real answer is 4,000 years. Because that’s how much of women’s history I was drawing on. And that’s how many generations of storytellers stood behind me. [paraphrased from audio]
On what’s at stake
History as the book’s most dangerous argumentAtwood has returned across four decades to the question of how authoritarian systems sustain themselves, and she has consistently named that question as the engine of the novel. Her concern predates Gilead as a concept; it is a preoccupation that runs from her earliest thinking about the 20th century into every book she has written since.
One of the things that has occupied me really quite a lot over time is how do these dictatorships get going? And how do they maintain themselves and then fall apart?
Critics who read the book as an attack on Christianity missed what Atwood was doing with religion, and she has been precise about the distinction. In a France 24 interview, she drew a line between the historical Christian tradition and Gilead’s use of scripture as an instrument of state coercion.
I feel that the people objecting to my book are not Christian. They’re not sticking to the central principles of Christianity and that would be the Golden Rule and love your neighbor as yourself... I feel that I’m upholding the honor of Christianity by displaying its perversion. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s power structure is frequently read as a simple binary: men on top, women on the bottom. Atwood has pushed back against that reading in multiple conversations, including her TIME interview alongside actress Elisabeth Moss, because she thinks it makes Gilead tidier and less instructive than the real thing.
If it were only a feminist book, you would think, in that case, all the women are over here on the low side, and all the men are over here on the high side. But it’s more like the way human societies actually arrange themselves, which means some powerful people at the top. The women connected to those people have more power than the men connected to the bottom rank.
The Aunts, who enforce the handmaids’ subjugation, and the Wives, who benefit from a hierarchy they help sustain, are not aberrations. They are the system working exactly as designed, which is what makes the book’s distribution of complicity so uncomfortable to sit with.
What she wants us to sit with
Two futures, not oneAtwood wrote the book as a warning and has said so without qualification for forty years. What sharpened that warning over time was not the novel itself but its reception: the readers who found its scenario more plausible in each successive decade than in the last.
It is a warning, simply because I never have believed it can’t happen here. And more and more people are joining me in that lack of belief.
The novel’s epilogue, the ‘Historical Notes,’ is set 200 years after Gilead, at an academic conference where scholars analyze Offred’s recovered testimony as a historical artifact. Atwood borrowed the device from George Orwell, whose 1984 ends with an essay on Newspeak written in past tense to signal that the regime eventually ended. Her own epilogue carries the same structural argument. Gilead falls. The question is what survives it.
When asked whether The Handmaid’s Tale is about to ‘come true,’ I remind myself that there are two futures in the book, and that if the first one comes true, the second one may do so also.